African press review 21 September 2015

Nigeria's Senate president faces arrest today on graft allegations; a Nigerian man slaughters his father and runs away with the heart; and Boko Haram's leader Abubakar Shekau posts a new audio message mocking Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari.

The Nigerian press has been dissecting a new audio tape allegedly released by the leader of the Boko Haram sect. The Nation reports that the message in Arabic and Hausa posted by Shekau on YouTube debunks President Buhari’s promise to crush the insurgency in three months.

"Buhari is deceiving Nigerians," says the man claiming to be Shekau. “We are alive, I am alive, and this is my voice, more audible than it was before." Shekau had been announced several times dead by the Nigerian military.

A correspondent of The Nation spoke to witnesses of a spate of suspected Boko Haram bombings at several venues, including a mosque in the Borno State capital Sunday night.

The army called the improvised explosive devices in Gomari and Ajilari areas of Maiduguri as evidence of the state of desperation in which the insurgents are right now.

Several newspapers are monitoring the latest push by the Nigerian military in the north-east for the final defeat of Boko Haram insurgents.

Vanguard reports that advancing troops over the weekend captured the villages of Jerre and Dipchari, where some of the insurgents were based.

The paper quotes an army spokesman saying that dozens of haggard-looking and malnourished men, women and children arrived in the liberated flash town of Bama on Sunday. Today’s Nigerian papers carry chilling accounts of the ordeal suffered by some of the villagers freed, some saying they had to give all they had as food to the insurgents in exchange for their lives.

The Sun counts down to “make or mar day” for Nigeria’s Senate President Bukola Saraki, who is facing arrest after being charged on 13 counts of corruption by the Code of Conduct’s Tribunal (CCT). The tribunal last weekend issued a warrant of arrest on the Senate president for failing to appear before it last Friday.

The CCT also accused the Senate president of engaging in an anticipatory declaration of assets that had made a false declaration of assets in forms he filed before the Code of Conduct Bureau during his days as governor of Kwara state. Saraki is the third-highest personality in the Federal of Nigeria. The Sun says the arraignment of the Senate president by the CCT will determine, substantially, the shape and tenor his political life.

And Punch Metro leads with a horror story that sent shockwaves down the spines of Nigerians - the murder and extraction of the heart of a 70-year old-man by his own son. The 34-year-old chief suspect reportedly stabbed his dad to death after a dispute at their home in the Ipaja area of Lagos State on Friday. The man originating from Ondo State had been living in the estate for 15 years with his father who was battling a stroke.